


Makings of Paradise

by lynndyre



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-10 00:38:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17415638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: Celebrian sails. Gil-Galad returns.  Together, they'll wait.





	Makings of Paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RaisingCaiin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/gifts).



The sky does her weeping for her, when Celebrian leaves her husband on the pier and sails for the unknown. She holds the hand he last clasped tight to her chest as the ship slips underway. Light droplets, misting on guard rails and wetting the heavy ropes, turn to a driving rain bare hours free of the harbour. The voyage blurs with storms and despair, the last sight of his face blurs likewise, and the weather blows them ever westward.

In the cold dark of the morning before the sun, Celebrian watches lightning dance down towards the waves, and stab between the clouds, flaring like reflected fireworks. Like incendiary bombs. Outside the porthole, there is a single seabird perched on the railing, whose cry she cannot hear over the wind. Celebrian imagines it screaming. The scream is inside her.

The next day is landfall, and Celebrian gathers with Imladris' other few expatriots in tight, miserable formation before the gangplanks. Merieth whose husband is dead, Fallion whose daughter fell in Celebrian's arms. Many of them will go to family, to those who have already come, some few to those who never left.

Celebrian goes to no one. Mother, Father, Elrond, all her children remain where she could not. Mother's family are an unknown, unspoken to since before the Sun rose, and she will not go as supplicant to strangers. Still less to her husband's parents, who would be strangers even to Elrond.

No. Celebrian comes to Aman untied, untethered, and ungrounded. There are halls and houses set apart where those newly arrived to the Blessed Realms may dwell in transition, and that is where Celebrian remains. They are closer to the trees, farther from the Quenya-speaking marketplaces and impossible standards of joy. The healers who visit the transition housing have a faint, constant glow about them that buzzes along the nerves of Celebrian's body when they touch her- hands softer than Elrond's, voices strange, medicines blended of plants she has never tasted before. 

There is a sense of healing, an essence of wholesomeness, that seems to seep upward from the unsullied ground, to breathe out from undarkened forests, to hang in the air, in sunlight unreached by Shadow. Aman is beautiful, but the disconnection remains, between her soul and body and the realm around her. After days among others who also hurt, among healers who do not know them, and do not understand the broken world, Celebrian feels anger. Anger at the light, at the clear and perfect air, at the healer's smiles. At the sound of Quenya-accented voices. At the aching emptiness in her heart and in her arms, where none of her loved ones are within reach.

Later she will look back and see the anger was the first sprout of feeling breaking through the numbing desert of her despair. But even as she heals, the empty ache remains.

Beyond the Halls of Acclimation are spread wide gardens; past the brightest flowers, paved paths branch outwards to vanish in sprawling meadow, lawn, and distant orchard. To the south there is a twined hedge that opens into a green labyrinth, with many paths twisting around each other, leading to small clearings concealing statues, small benches for contemplation, follies. The pathways are plotted to match the orbits of ancient stars, in patterns that were obsolete long before Celebrian's birth.

She spends long hours in the maze. Elven made, there is no chance of losing her way, but nor does she strive to keep any track of her footsteps, letting the paths lead her where they will, and greeting each new-discovered sculpted beauty or monstrosity in turn. In the months, and then the years of her healing, she learns them all.

Time vanishes, in the West, but it is long between her coming and the day Gil-galad is reborn. There is no fanfare to the re-embodiment of a king- or if there is, it is far distant- here there is only a new elf in the transition halls, a new old face to recognise, in the clearing with the dog. 

The dog in question is no noble statue, no Huan to face the werewolf, only a small rat-catching terrier. He is carved of yellow jade, set close to ground level, so that sitting upon the bench, an elven hand might rest on its sun-warmed head. And so is Gil-Galad sitting when Celebrian finds him.

Unexpectedly, it is a joy. Celebrian shivers with it, of late unused to the feeling. 

This elf is not the distant High King of her girlhood, kind enough but busy, and seen in councils with her parents. Nor does he seem the same as Elrond's memories, of lord and lover, though Celebrian thinks that description may be closer. But this Gil-Galad is reborn, renewed, and no longer a king- though he holds the title, Valinor is becomea land of many kings indeed, and Gil-Galad can live as himself, whosoever he may choose to be. 

Newly embodied, and new to all the physicallity of the world, the person Gil-galad chooses to be is highly distractable. Even as they speak, from the small pretty speeches of greeting to the telling of lives, his hands seek out the smooth jade of the dog, the pattern edging the low bench, the twigs and leaves of the labyrinth walls beside them. He looses the thread of conversation in following the walk of a red beetle along the edge of a leaf, and his hand captures Celebrian's apparently without his notice, new-smooth fingers warm, and absently stroking her own. It is the first touch in paradise that does not buzz with discomfort under her skin, the first that has not been unwelcome since Elrond's hand in hers.

The beetle takes wing, and Gil-Galad's fingers tighten around Celebrian's, a brief pulse of joy at that tiny life, that small triumph against the air. And so the High King, lowering his eyes from a beetle, is the first to see Celebrian's smile grace the West.

It is a dance in many steps, from thence. Forward and back together, stepping side, and side, and turning, as many twists as the labyrinth itself, and more. The soft-edged seasons of Valinor pass one to the next to the next. From his time in the Halls, Gil-Galad does not know the happenings in Middle Earth, and Celebrian fills many afternoons with stories of Rivendell, of Elrond, of their children. Of the world, becoming ever more a world of men.

Gil-Galad remains as tactile as their first meeting, though only, Celebrian finds, with herself. There is a mantle of kingship he wears for those more distant, and she is glad to be inside it, where his hands seek out hers, where his dark braids brush her face, and his embrace- rare, and then more frequent- is startling in its lack of threat. 

Whatever closeness, whatever fellowship they have, she wants it.

In darkening twilight they curl close to watch the stars, jade dog at their feet, and wait for Earendil to pass. Gil-Galad is near enough for Celebrian to smell the scent of his skin when he moves, and it is strange to smell purely elf, after more than two thousand years of Elrond's faintly Mannish musk, and the diluted familial mixes of her children. She laughs, then, and tells him so, and Gil-Galad's chuckles echo through their bodies to reverberate deep in her lungs.

Elrond's scent is one they both miss. That night, Celebrian offers her former king a different story. Not of her children, but of the making of them, and his arms band around her so tight and so strong that she thrills in not being afraid.

Between blossoming peach trees, pink-petalled and white, he offers a story of his own, of Elrond's striving youth in the Second Age, of a bight communion shared between king and herald, friend and closest friend. Celebrian pushes him back against the treetrunk, and kisses his mouth until crushed petals fall from clenched fingers in both their hair.

At the height of that kiss, Celebrian opens her eyes, and the daughter of Galadriel opens her mind also, drawing Gil-galad within her to where Elrond's spirit is twined insolubly at her core. It is a connection she has avoided, for fear of sharing only pain, but this-- Celebrian strokes her husband's soul, and offers their spirits to touch.

The joy that blazes in them is bright as the first dawn, and Celebrian feels it glowing from her skin. Renewed, however distant, Elrond burns in her with bright hope, and Gil-galad wraps arms and spirit around them both.


End file.
